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More on Doing a Page a Day
September 10, 2004
Gerry commented on my post yesterday that he hasn't been able to do a page a day, so instead he does an article a day. So I thought I'd outline here what I've done with my one site and what I plan to do with all of my sites.
I find that the most time intensive part of creating a site is working on the actual structure. What I've been doing - and since it works really well for me, I'll probably just keep on doing it - is creating my own "template". I figure out exactly how I want my banner, nav buttons, sidebar(s) and footer to look, then once that's done, I use it as the template. Since I'm not that familiar with html, creating this template is probably one of the more time-consuming processes for me.
Then, when I have my template, I save the top bar, sidebar and footer into server side includes. Then I create a "template page" that references the SSIs.
So, when I talk about doing a page a day, it's actually minimal coding. Basically, I'm doing the same thing that Gerry's doing - writing an article a day. I slip that into my template, save it as the new page, upload it, then link that page to my home page and my sitemap.
And when I want to add a new category that will change my sidebar or my nav buttons, I just change whichever server side include file is involved. The changes are universal and I don't have to go back in to re-code anything.
When I was first figuring out how to work with SSIs, I found the best explanation at Sean Burns' Webmasters Reference site.
I've been finding that in many ways, it's like posting to my blog, except that I have to insert my html formatting tags - but that's usually only the paragraph tag and headers. Of course, I can't get to this point in the process until I actually have the site all designed and coded, but once that's done, adding the content is much easier.
- BJ
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Posted by BJ at 08:49 PM in Internet Marketing | Permalink
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